Tag: grammar school entrance test

What has 6 faces and is an amazing teacher?

Quick 11+ game of the day. Grab a dice, grab a targeted vocabulary list from the net, print it out, and BOOM, you have a game board. Write a sentence with each word you land on. Don't know the meaning of the word? Excellent. Look it up and you're both learning new words that can be a part of your child's next story.

DICE

A pair of fantastic teachers!

Who can reach the end of the list first?

Who can reach the furthest in 11 minutes? 

Play with one or two dice. Throw a double? Make up a rule: go backwards, steal your opponent's word, write a sentence with two words from the list...anything you can think of. 

In short bursts, in cafes, under the table, between sessions when your child is tiring...dice turn learning into fun. A bonus? They're not electronic! Just you, your child, the dice, fun and learning. 

Please share how your game turned out at leemottram@11plushappy.com

You'll find a whole chapter dedicated to dice in the brand new parent and child guide, Teach Your Little Genius to Pass 11 Plus Creative Writing Exams. Yey!

It’s okay to feel lost

You’re teaching your child nearly every day and it is working. You are making a difference. You are helping them. This is hopefully about adventure, not pressure. Challenge, not problem.

Sometimes, you will be lost. You must be lost. It’s required.

The brilliant author Seth Godin says it marvellously that true learning requires ‘tension and discomfort.’ Before change come moments of not knowing, not understanding, perhaps not even being aware of what you are supposed to know.

Learning an eleven plus curriculum means your child is engaged with at least eight forms of knowledge. It also means you are, too. Those forms are:

  1. Information they have already learned at school, so will be revising.
  2. Information they are familiar with, but purposefully repackaged into multistep problems they will not be familiar with, which are designed to test logic and a creative ability to use information.
  3. New skills and concepts they will not know. Eleven plus exams involve a Year 6 curriculum, but exams are sat at the start of Year 6 – before that curriculum may have been taught in your child’s school.
  4. Exam techniques: learning how to manage time; how to dive deeply into the parts of a question to make sure they understand what is being asked and which method they should use to solve it; how to not be fooled by incorrect answers; to do all of this as efficiently and carefully (yes, there’s a contradiction there) as possible.
  5. Learning to mistrust and test and not be tricked by multiple choice answers that are designed to trick children.
  6. To believe in and keep returning to a growth mindset that understands learning is not fixed, that new skills and information can be taught and learned and understood.
  7. Stamina and buoyancy to start learning, stay learning and continue to prepare for many months. This includes feeling lost and found many times, a cycle of discovering what you know, discovering and celebrating what you don’t know, and having the cool courage to begin learning each chunk of what you don’t know, so that in the end, your child runs out of nearly everything they don’t know in time for the exams.
  8. Doing all of this inside relationships: parent and child, grown-up and child, tuition, friends, clubs, grandparents, and so on. Finding a way for everyone to be on the same page, to trust, to be okay about asking for, and being given help, from different people, to understand and not blame frustrations. To know when a break is needed. To know when a smile and a hug is needed.

This is a huge set of tasks, and feeling lost is normal. If you can embrace feeling lost, accept that it means you are on the right path, you can stay happier, learn more, and surrender to the long-term process and path, the ‘journey’.

One step at a time – or one step ahead?

One of the most helpful methods that served me as a dad when teaching both my children, and which serves nearly every teacher on the planet, is to forget knowing everything, and focus on being one step ahead of your child. It’s such a simple process, but it can make the learning session so much easier for you both.

For example, feedback from a test shows your son or daughter doesn’t know about angles in quadrilaterals and triangles. Before you rush in to solve or give more questions, set aside an hour for you to learn about these. Books like Bond How to do 11plus Maths, CGP’s Year 6 Maths, are good introductions, as are youtube channels like Corbett maths and Khan academy, as well as the BBC teaching part of its website. You have the whole internet to help you. My go to book for learning about concepts, which I recommend to parents of the children I tutor, is Derek Haylock’s Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers.

You don’t need to know everything or visit all channels. Just knowing enough of the topic for you to understand the basic concepts ahead of your child will allow you to answer a few of their questions, possibly to recognise mistakes in their thinking, and to delve into the subject and some questions with them.

As a class teacher, I would always brush up on knowledge or skills ahead of teaching children. As a tutor, I do this continually.

Admitting you don’t know something is good for your child’s learning.

During a session, if you don’t understand something or can’t answer a question your child has asked (yet), it’s a wonderful moment to compliment your child’s curiosity and intelligence: “What a great question! I’m not sure, let’s explore and try and find out.”

This admission has three wonderful benefits you definitely want in your learning time together:

  1. Your child watches how you respond to not knowing, and when they see you respond positively and excitedly, it’s more likely he or she will learn to respond the same way.
  2. You give them permission to not know or understand something. In fact, you normalise not knowing and understanding something as a vital part of actually learning it!
  3. You create a mood of being willing to explore a topic. To open up, not shut down.

It’s okay to feel lost. You are helping your child. You are both learning. Enjoy your time being lost and exploring together.

Stay learning, stay happy, stay 11plushappy!

My best, Lee

It’s okay to feel lost

You’re teaching your child nearly every day and it is working. You are making a difference. You are helping them. This is hopefully about adventure, not pressure. Challenge, not problem.

Sometimes, you will be lost. You must be lost. It’s required.

The brilliant author Seth Godin says it marvellously that true learning requires ‘tension and discomfort.’ Before change come moments of not knowing, not understanding, perhaps not even being aware of what you are supposed to know.

Learning an eleven plus curriculum means your child is engaged with at least eight forms of knowledge. It also means you are, too. Those forms are:

  1. Information they have already learned at school, so will be revising.
  2. Information they are familiar with, but purposefully repackaged into multistep problems they will not be familiar with, which are designed to test logic and a creative ability to use information.
  3. New skills and concepts they will not know. Eleven plus exams involve a Year 6 curriculum, but exams are sat at the start of Year 6 – before that curriculum may have been taught in your child’s school.
  4. Exam techniques: learning how to manage time; how to dive deeply into the parts of a question to make sure they understand what is being asked and which method they should use to solve it; how to not be fooled by incorrect answers; to do all of this as efficiently and carefully (yes, there’s a contradiction there) as possible.
  5. Learning to mistrust and test and not be tricked by multiple choice answers that are designed to trick children.
  6. To believe in and keep returning to a growth mindset that understands learning is not fixed, that new skills and information can be taught and learned and understood.
  7. Stamina and buoyancy to start learning, stay learning and continue to prepare for many months. This includes feeling lost and found many times, a cycle of discovering what you know, discovering and celebrating what you don’t know, and having the cool courage to begin learning each chunk of what you don’t know, so that in the end, your child runs out of nearly everything they don’t know in time for the exams.
  8. Doing all of this inside relationships: parent and child, grown-up and child, tuition, friends, clubs, grandparents, and so on. Finding a way for everyone to be on the same page, to trust, to be okay about asking for, and being given help, from different people, to understand and not blame frustrations. To know when a break is needed. To know when a smile and a hug is needed.

This is a huge set of tasks, and feeling lost is normal. If you can embrace feeling lost, accept that it means you are on the right path, you can stay happier, learn more, and surrender to the long-term process and path, the ‘journey’.

One step at a time – or one step ahead?

One of the most helpful methods that served me as a dad when teaching both my children, and which serves nearly every teacher on the planet, is to forget knowing everything, and focus on being one step ahead of your child. It’s such a simple process, but it can make the learning session so much easier for you both.

For example, feedback from a test shows your son or daughter doesn’t know about angles in quadrilaterals and triangles. Before you rush in to solve or give more questions, set aside an hour for you to learn about these. Books like Bond How to do 11plus Maths, CGP’s Year 6 Maths, are good introductions, as are youtube channels like Corbett maths and Khan academy, as well as the BBC teaching part of its website. You have the whole internet to help you. My go to book for learning about concepts, which I recommend to parents of the children I tutor, is Derek Haylock’s Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers.

You don’t need to know everything or visit all channels. Just knowing enough of the topic for you to understand the basic concepts ahead of your child will allow you to answer a few of their questions, possibly to recognise mistakes in their thinking, and to delve into the subject and some questions with them.

As a class teacher, I would always brush up on knowledge or skills ahead of teaching children. As a tutor, I do this continually.

Admitting you don’t know something is good for your child’s learning.

During a session, if you don’t understand something or can’t answer a question your child has asked (yet), it’s a wonderful moment to compliment your child’s curiosity and intelligence: “What a great question! I’m not sure, let’s explore and try and find out.”

This admission has three wonderful benefits you definitely want in your learning time together:

  1. Your child watches how you respond to not knowing, and when they see you respond positively and excitedly, it’s more likely he or she will learn to respond the same way.
  2. You give them permission to not know or understand something. In fact, you normalise not knowing and understanding something as a vital part of actually learning it!
  3. You create a mood of being willing to explore a topic. To open up, not shut down.

It’s okay to feel lost. You are helping your child. You are both learning. Enjoy your time being lost and exploring together.

Stay learning, stay happy, stay 11plushappy!

My best, Lee

Go Backwards Technique – score higher in 11plus practice tests and writing

“You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

Dr Seuss

The Go Backwards technique is an ally of the Go Forwards technique.

Very simply, do the test until finished, no matter how long it takes.
How long did it take? As with yesterday’s Go Forwards Technique, celebrate this – you have a benchmark to start from. For the next test, issue a new challenge:

Can you knock a minute off your last time?

Example: Your child takes 68 minutes to finish a 40-minute test. Praise them for finishing it and agree you have a brilliant place to start. Enthuse them by letting them know they’re just 28 tiny steps away.

Next test, can you do it in 67?

Sometimes this cuts as much as five minutes off the first time you try it. Don’t worry if not, a minute is all we’re after. Whatever the new time – as long as it’s quicker than the last time – this now becomes the new time to beat by a minute. If they don’t beat it, then stick to the first time as the one to beat. (Avoid setting a slower time as the starting point.)
After twenty tests over a couple of months, your child should be on their way to finishing within, or very close to, the given time.

Your power in this step is to simply keep going – one minute less, one minute less, perhaps pacing this challenge to every 2-3 tests, until they are within the range. Mixing in with the Go Forwards technique may be a happy and helpful pattern for variety.

Key to the success of the Go Backwards technique is don’t try and take too much time off at once.

Don’t push your child to finish in half the time; this will likely lead to rushing and an increase in mistakes. It’s a balancing act and an adventure. You are promoting a gentle reduction.

A challenge is never – you must; it’s a fun experiment – Shall we see if we can?

Again, the Go Backwards Technique works well with creative story writing. Suppose your child writes 2 pages (see next page) and it takes them an hour and a half. By now, you know what we do: celebrate the pages and use the time as a benchmark. Next story, can you write 2 pages in 89 minutes? Continue in this way. Even if it takes takes three days to write 2 pages. Next story, two days, then one and a half days, and so on. Over the long term, they may well be at fifty minutes. The art of the possible. Just keep swimming, as Dory says. 49, 48, etc.

• For a 25-minute piece of writing, a page and a paragraph to a page and a half is an excellent amount to aim for. This turns out to be around 7-8 paragraphs with around 5 lines to a paragraph.


• For a 40-60-minute test, plan and practise writing between 2-2½ pages, around 10-12 paragraphs.


Any less and there may not be enough material to mark or show strength, nor will there be enough space to put in all the essential ingredients of a stand-out piece of writing; any more and your child may not have time to go back and check.

One of the easiest ways to win points can be for your child to go over things they’ve just written and check punctuation, spelling, grammar, and perhaps swap words for more exciting ones.

It’s likely for any of us that in a first draft (which a test piece of writing is) we will miss things, misspell homophones, leave out punctuation, or use a word that we would rather change for a better one, and so on.

Do you want to help your child’s writing better? The best it can be? Two further truths matter:
1) SPACED time. By which we mean, start early and give them the habit of writing regularly over a period of months, if not years. By starting early, you are not adding pressure, you are removing it.

2) Deliberate writing with a deliberate purpose for most pieces. For example, in one story, work on using all punctuation, while in the follow up, focus on similes or structure, while preserving the previous punctuation.

Fold in features like folding ingredients in a recipe one by one. You are baking a happy learning cake that will rise slowly and steadily.

Of course, we need to say that not all writing should be controlled. In some practice sessions, freedom to write is everything. Two absolute benefits of not worrying about time in some writing sessions is that creativity and imagination come out to play, while you will probably with more writing to assess, giving you a clearer view of what the next steps might be.

In rehearsal writing, feel free to jump up and down with real enthusiasm and appreciation for the words your child has written. I love this quote, it’s at the root of driving happy, successful learning:

“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” – Anatole France.

I enjoy celebrating and finding out what students don’t know, as it means we can teach them the gaps and increasingly run out of things they don’t know or can’t yet do.

BUT…I love just as much taking every chance to appreciate and congratulate children for what they have written successfully in each story or essay. We grow more of what we want with specific praise and general and abundant love and encouragement.

Encouragement, enthusiasm and praise ARE teaching tools.

Why do spectators cheer during the 100m? During marathons? What are they giving
to the athletes that the athletes don’t already have? Give the same feeling to your child. It’s wonderful.
To sum up, the Go Backwards Technique helps:

  1. Coach your child to work towards finishing the test in time by gradually
    reducing each test by a minute.
  2. Reduces the time taken to write an 11+ story or piece of non-fiction, while
    increasing the passion and quality of their writing because you value every
    sentence along the way while encouraging them to slowly blend in more ‘must-haves’ of dazzlingly brilliant creative writing.

I hope this post helps you. Please share and subscribe. Let’s help children reach their highest mark with a smile on their face.

Stay happy,

Lee, London

Go Forwards technique: How to use time to get better scores in 11plus practice tests

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

T.S.Eliot

Happy Classroom 3 (Part 3 of a series on how time helps your child prepare and pass.)

The Go Forwards technique has one aim: increase the number of questions
your child can answer within the time set by the target school.


How long is each part of your child’s test? Check with your chosen schools.
Most tests look something like this:
• Stories/recount/creative writing tests: 25 minutes, or 40-60 minutes.
• English comprehension/grammar/multiple choice: 30-50 minutes.
• Maths papers multiple choice/written: 40-60 minutes
• Verbal and non-verbal reasoning papers: 30 to 50 minutes.
• Combined English/verbal reasoning: 45minutes
In weekly practice tests, both you and your child can use the following 4 steps:

  1. Note the time allocated to a given practice paper.
  2. Begin the test and stop exactly when the time says, whether you have
    finished or not.
  3. How many questions did your child leave out? Three, ten, fifteen? Regardless
    of the number, congratulations – your child now has a starting point that lets
    you both know what he or she can do within the time.
    Now comes the value. Set your child a fun challenge:
  4. Can you answer just 1 more question within the given time in the next test?
    Interestingly, by trying to beat a score by one, they may answer 2 or 3
    more, just by being aware of it.
    Next test after that, the same challenge – can they answer just one more question
    than in the previous test?
    You can work out that over a couple of months, it’s quite possible for your child to be
    answering all the questions within the given time.
    Just by increasing the number of questions they can confidently answer by 1 each
    time.
    The key is a GRADUAL INCREASE. It is the art of the possible. The art of
    happy. Better to first answer questions correctly, then answer quickly.

Eventually, a month before the test day at least, although it could be much sooner,
your child looks to finish practice tests with around 5 minutes to spare to use for
checking time.

Introduce speed slowly. (Oxymoron alert – speed slowly…hmm.)

(Musical instrument lessons follow a similar method.)
It is better to learn to recognise the tricks multiple choice tests play, better to learn
neat and effective ways to find the information and avoid the tricks played by the
answers; thereafter, turning up the speed will have a purpose. Is there any point in doing something wrong fast?


HAPPY TIP: The Go Forwards technique is also a fantastic booster for creative
writing practice.


If your child writes a couple of paragraphs in an initial session, praise them, then in
the next session, issue a relaxed challenge to write one more sentence next time.
Continue to issue fresh challenges to add extra sentences in the next piece of
writing.

You may wish to pace this challenge to every second or third piece of writing, so they are not always thinking of increasing quantity at the expense of quality.

I hope this is helpful advice. Please come back for classroom 4 in the next couple of days.

Lee, London

This is what a good 11plus routine looks like (but yours will look better)

HAPPY CLASSROOM 2: Making Use of Daily Time

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

John Dewey

Hang on, in our first post in this series we were talking superheroes and inspiration…now we’re talking routine?
What does routine have to do with being a superhero? Help your child see this – everything.
No finer a philosopher than Roman emperor Marcus Aurelias pointed out everything is a series of steps. Superhero Iron Man checked his equipment before using it. In fact, nearly all
his downtime was spent checking and refining, building new equipment and skills!
In today’s classroom, we realise that to stay true to educator John Dewey’s quote above,
we are committing to making education a large, joyful part of our daily lives. So what does time look like to an 11plus superhero? The answer may be both smaller and larger than you imagine: 10% of your child’s week, around 8% of your week.
Really?

Really.

Let’s start by making one thing clear: your child will not be studying all the time.


Play is not an option – it is crucial. They need it. (And anyway, play is learning.)
Exercise is crucial.
Laughter and friends are crucial.
Life is important – it doesn’t disappear.
You prioritise.


For example, for my neighbour’s son and ours, instead of playing all day at
weekends, both children studied in the mornings when they were at their freshest
and, as importantly, before anything else could distract them. (After that, they would
throw apples or toys to each other over the garden fence and play all afternoon.)
This is why most schools teach English and Maths in the morning.
Why not hack the habit of the professionals?

Let’s begin to sculpt a possible routine. If your job is not 9-5 (is anyone’s now?), please keep reading, this is going to work. It is about the hours and the focus for each hour, not when those hours are.

WEEKDAYS

1. Commit to one written/multiple choice test at least 3 weekdays. Switch
between the subjects your child will be tested on, whether English, maths, verbal or
non-verbal reasoning.
Use a wide selection of web, pdf and print-out/paper resources. For example, Bond
Assessment books, Schofield & Sims Mental Arithmetic books, exampapersplus, maths practice from a reputable site like ixl or piacademy. TES is another free-to-sign up resource
website for teachers, which you can register and use to access hundreds of amazing
lessons uploaded by teachers. TIME: 30-60 minutes x 3-5 days.

2. Another week-day task would be to read through and mind-map a handful of
short chapters from Multiple-Choice English for Grammar School Success, to
allow your child to search for and beat specific traps hidden in English multiple choice questions and answers. When sitting a multiple-choice test, encourage your child to use the tips and hacks learned in the book to help them sit the test. Reading & mind-mapping: TIME: 30 mins.

3. A creative writing task, in which you deliberately choose to practise specific skills, is also an effective weekday learning behaviour. TIME: 20-60 mins.

4. Saturdays and Sundays: Two longer sessions in which you spend time on a couple of topics in depth, plus another writing exercise. (If your choice of school does not test creative writing, devote more time to the areas that will be tested.) My son and I used to go to a café, which we renamed as The Maths Café, where he would work through maths, comprehension and writing. Sometimes the café was the kitchen table; we even had it under the kitchen table. Make it fun: link it to pleasure and happiness. Your child will be glad to spend time with you. TIME: 2-3 hours each day with short breaks.

Shorter, weekly sessions give valuable practice at focusing and building the habit of learning.
This weekly routine also reveals:
✓ Topics not yet covered at school;
✓ Topics your child needs extra time and practice to understand.

Please note that first point above. Your child is going to be tested on areas
of maths and English that are often not taught until Y6, even though many tests
come at the start of Y6. Thus, another time truth is that your help and preparation
compresses time by introducing and teaching your child a handful of topics earlier
than the ordinary school calendar allows. The result is they learn more in less time.

By focusing on these gaps in your longer, weekend sessions together, in which you can share your fascination and confusion with a topic, as well as how much you are enjoying learning
it, what your child doesn’t know transforms into the next topic they are brilliant at! A
helpful attitude when blocks emerge is that yes, it’s tricky, and so was the last topic
we couldn’t do – and we can do that now.

An early challenge for my daughter was 2-step word problems; for my son it was
sorting out common homophones, particularly our/are and their/they’re. We identified
this during a week of assessments, then studied these areas in plenty of detail over
a month of weekends. We then repeated the weekly process to find more areas to
improve, while also checking to see if the topic we had just spent time on was now
easier to answer questions on.

Make sure you dip into more than one subject in your weekly sessions. Your child
needs to be developing across all 11+ subjects. It’s also vital to practise switching
between subjects because this is what happens in the real test, with a maths paper
followed by an English paper, or vice versa, on the same day.

Let’s look at a second example of a successful learning week, this time for Y5
children, perhaps from Spring 1 (January) onwards.

Monday: One or two long tests. Mark these on the day as part of the review; it will
help cement the learning and identify next-success focus areas. TIME: 45 minutes per
test, plus 15-20 minutes marking.

Tuesday: Choose one of the questions from last night’s test in which an error
happened. Now go through 2-3 books/websites and work only on that subject. Take
percentages as an example. Look at the percentages section of Bond – How To Do
11+ Maths, CGP KS2 Study Book & Question Book, CGP Year 6 Study Book for
New Curriculum, BBC Bitesize, TES, etc. TIME: 45-60 minutes.

Wednesday: Repeat this process for another question and another topic from
Monday’s test. TIME: 45-60 minutes.

Thursday: Choose another subject and do a long test. If you did English and maths
on Monday, do verbal or non-verbal today. Mark it on the same day, celebrate what
is known at the time, then note the tricky parts to focus on later. If you are mindful of
making your child feel happy for their effort and achievement, they are more likely to
agree to do more learning the next day. Feeling good feels good. TIME: 45-60 minutes.

Friday: Day off. (Really!)

Saturday: A longer session using books and websites on problem areas, plus one or
two long multiple choice or written tests. The aim? To close in on further weaknesses
so they become new strengths, show the learning achieved in the week, and
build stamina and speed for the real test. TIME: 3 hours with short breaks.

You may find previously difficult questions are now answered correctly with
understanding. If not, repeat the process, or log it and return to the subject in a
couple of weeks.

Sunday: Two long multiple choice or standard written papers, plus marking together,
plus a short teaching session on one identified topic. TIME: 2-3 hours with short
breaks.

EXTRA LEARNING SAUCE – SPACED LEARNING MINI-BITES.

Having to return to a subject a day or two later uses a different part of the brain than when we spend a long time on one subject, and can help with long term memory of concepts. SO, to mix it up, take a topic you learned, but instead of spending an hour on it, spend half an hour on helping your child understand the concept, then have them complete just 3-4 questions on this topic each day over four or five days, with perhaps a day off as part of this. E.g. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. This method gets round what psychologists call the ‘recency’ effect, whereby you think you will always remember what you are working on right now because it is familiar. In truth, we often forget. So having to remember the idea a day later, having to call up what we studied, makes that learning stronger. By the end of the 5 day period, your child’s learning could be so much stronger in that topic. Also, your child will be happy to only do 4 questions a day!

IMPORTANT: Does your child’s target school test creative writing? If so, encourage
and support your child to write 2-3 times a week during the summer holiday before
Y6. The more they write, both fiction and non-fiction, the more information you will have to help them improve and the more they will have a feel for how long it takes to write the correct amount.
TIME: 40-60 minutes.

In terms of resources, I find it’s helpful to use as wide a variety as possible from different providers. You can’t be sure which explanation is going to hit home with your child, nor do you
know what the exact layout of a question will be, so exposure to multiple formats just
makes sense. Of course, if your school uses one provider for the tests, such as GL
or CEM, then you can use these formats in a lot of your rehearsal. Still, don’t rely on these exclusively.

HAPPY AND SECRET MEGA-SUCCESSFUL LEARNING TIP…
Make time at the end of a focus-lesson for your child to write one or two
questions in a topic they have been studying. For example, design their own
averages question for you to work out mean, mode, median and range.

Why does this help?
✓ It shines a light on what your child understands. It also shows you what you
know. Remember, it is okay to be learning with our children.
✓ It’s creative and fun. You can find the average number of spiders that fall in
school custard – anything.
✓ Creativity and fun will help your child engage and stay learning.
✓ It builds your personal and learning relationship.
✓ In thinking how questions are put together, your child learns what to look for in
a question. Where are the keywords? Which information is irrelevant? How
can the mathematical units be changed (e.g. mm to m) to trick a person?
✓ It’s double learning. Not only are they solving the questions you write, they
must also work out answers to their own questions to check if you are correct.
It’s buy-one-get-one free learning.
As a prompt, let your child know you are going to write one or more incorrect answers on purpose to see if they can find them. Equally, you could have your child play the same trick on you. I hope you see just how fantastic a teaching tool children’s own questions can be.
This routine is all very well, but what if you work weekends or nights?

Remember our picture from the beginning?

Does teh idea of finding a regular 11-lus learning routine for your child look like this?

Relax.
To be clear, a successful routine is about three things:

  1. The hours needed to embrace all topics successfully.
  2. The regularity and good habit-building helps rocket-boost learning by using
    spaced-time, by exposing your child to more moments of thinking about the
    topics, as well as by reducing time available for non-learning poor habits like
    purposeless internet browsing.
  3. A crucial balance between practice/gap-finding sessions and longer sessions on a single subject.
    Swap days and times as you need to.
    Build a routine honestly around your life and there’s more chance of it working.
    If you work weekends, but are around during the week, then do longer sessions after
    school.
    It adds up to approximately 10 hours a week. In the summer holiday, expand this to
    3 hrs a day, around 18 hrs a week, with a day off. 18 out of 168 hours in a week is just north of 10%.

Over to you. Take time to digest this post. You may wish to mindmap the ideas and reflect on your version of a routine that works for you. Do note that it is quite likely you will have to make some adjustments to your ‘normal’ family routine, but then you know that, because you already know education is life – it is why you are committing to the 11plus adventure for your child in the first place. Please share your alternative routines and let me know if I have missed anything you feel should be included.

See you next time for the third post in our series on how time can help your child get the most of their 11 plus learning.

Start learning, stay learning, stay 11plushappy!

Lee, London.

7 happy ways time can help your child pass the 11+

Originally, I spoke about ‘using’ time. However, life and learning have moved on. Thanks to books like Oliver Burkeman’s incredible 4000 Weeks, I’m rethinking my relationship with time. Rather than seeing it as a resource to use and consume, it’s perhaps wiser to see it as an ally. Together, you and time can make a huge difference to your child’s learning path, and thus, massively increase their chances of success at your dream school.

Everything we do depends on time. Everything we do, we do in time.
Often, a task we don’t do or don’t complete is because we run out of time. As often, we run out of time not because the end was too far away to reach, but because we started late. The end was always there; the beginning was lost.
This is never more so than when preparing for and passing tests. What you are about to read – combined with the time you take to read it, make notes and DO it – DO time – is going to transform your child’s learning and results. Starting today.
Time is on your side, but it seems to have two opposing energies within it. Realise:
✓ How creative it can be;
✓ How perishable it is.
Every second is single-use; we can’t use yesterday’s time, today’s time, or tomorrow’s time, ever again. Like an apple, time doesn’t last, but like an apple, it doesn’t need to. The goodness comes from crunching on it while it is ripe.

HAPPY WARNING: Much of this is learning for you. It’s learning you will put into practice with the child you are brave enough and wonderful enough to be helping. Filter the information in a way that is playful, fun and stress free. Always make children believe they can do lots, learn lots and grow lots.

For they can and do.

A total growth mindset.
Instead of worrying about running out of time or having no time, or complaining of wasting time, you may frame time, personify it as a friend or teacher or special power – whichever model or metaphor speaks to your child. Embed what follows over the next 7 days of blogs (please come back to keep up) into a regular, happy learning routine. (John Lamerton’s amazing book, Routine Machine, changed my life on living routines.) Over time, each time skill should become a natural, background time-habit, a pattern of thinking and action that becomes instinctive for you both. Be playful and adapt the 7 ways for your own child. Some children pick up strategies and put them into practice quickly, while others need to rehearse the ideas and action several times. Both responses are fine. Each child is different. It’s why I absolutely love tutoring 1:1 – finding the path that works for each child is incredibly rewarding.

So, welcome to the 11plushappy School of Time! An 8 day blogfest that I hope helps you prepare yourself and your child for the path ahead.

Happy Classroom 1: The Superhero Moment of the 11 Plus

“They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or any place.”

Malala Yousafzai

The 11 Plus may be your child’s first superhero moment. A first – and ongoing – task is to enthuse both you and your child into seeing this. To get 100% behind the adventure.
Encourage them to feel excited about the all-or-nothing opportunity that the preparation and entrance tests represent.

Yes, both the exam and the preparation are all-or-nothing opportunities. You can’t do one without the other. An exam without preparation is a car without wheels.


As a dad in the playground, I remember loving parents speaking about letting their child ‘just have a go’ at the 11+ on the day, without ‘all those boring months of doing papers’. Perhaps they felt either their child was smart enough, or else might be lucky enough on the day. They were also against forcing their children to do extra learning. I said nothing, but my feeling back then – as it is now – was that this approach just couldn’t be right.

After happy years of teaching, I am certain it isn’t right.

Of course, you should rightly consider your child bright, but it still doesn’t add up that you would ask your child to sit a test without preparing for a test. Your child may be a Ferrari, but a Ferrari without wheels is a Ferrari without wheels: it’s not going far. Which car would win a race? A 2020 Ferrari without wheels or a 2000 Yaris with wheels? Preparation=wheels! (I love my Yaris.)

You might wish to cut the following three sentences out and stick them where your
child will see them daily: next to your child’s bed, on the fridge (even in the fridge!),
perhaps the car dashboard if you drive to school.

“You can’t save the world when you feel like it –
you can only save the world when it needs saving!
You can’t sit the test when you feel like it –
you can only sit the test on the day it happens, at the time you’re given.
You can’t prepare for the test when you feel like it –
you can only prepare now!”

There is no later, there is now.


Better still, invite your child to copy the sentences with coloured pens or pencils and design their own poster to display. Write them inside a unicorn speech bubble or draw each word as if it has been built from Lego…whatever they love to look at is best.


The 11 Plus, handled right, is not pressure, it is adventure. It is not forcing, it is freeing. A chance for your child to influence their own future; a chance for you to influence your child’s future. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get involved with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
At its heart is the love and joy of learning.
It is a series of fizzy wow moments as your child figures something new out, which runs parallel to becoming more confident and empowered by rehearsing knowledge and skills they have already. Make it fun, give them lots of specific genuine praise, and be amazed by how much they grow and come to know. You are teaching your child that they can and should think big, that they are capable of giving everything.
Yes, true, heroes may not always win – but they are winners.
Giving everything to something that matters when it matters makes you a winner, doesn’t it? It’s always possible that in whatever you do, you may not get the result in the end, but it is certain you will not get the result if you do not try with everything you have.

As much as possible, you need to be willing to be your own guarantee.
Teach your child to see and believe this, and to work accordingly in order to make it true. When I was out jogging, around the time of helping my daughter prepare, for 6 months I visualised her getting the letter of admission into grammar school as I ran my last 300 metres. That visualisation helped me out so many times when my daughter and I hit learning blocks. It also prepared me to be calm and happy in the next learning session, even if the last one hadn’t gone too well, which it often didn’t.
By trying, by going for it, your child learns to hold their head up high. You are allowing them to build coping skills, passion skills and belief skills. Do not deny the truth of this message: the strongest way to make time work with you is to realise and accept now that this is a true superhero moment. Grab a book and dive in. Make five extra minutes to learn something together and you increase your child’s chances. Increase the minutes and you further increase those chances.

What will you start with?
Times tables? Why not declare your house a T.T.E.Z. (Times Tables Emergency Zone) until they’re all known? Tables help with fractions, division, percentages, word problems…and multiplication. Put up posters declaring the emergency and have quick, spontaneous meetings under the kitchen table to rehearse the 7 times table, or behind the sofa to rehearse the 12 times tables and their division facts.
How about spelling? For example, do they know the rules for turning reply into replies is:
Swap y for i, then and add -es on to words ending in a consonant + y? (Whereas, just add ‘s’ if it’s a vowel + y? Think key to keys.) Is there one spelling pattern that trips them up regularly? Focus on that with fun and encouragement. Be fascinated when you learn something.
Remember: you can only prepare now. Today. See you tomorrow for Happy Classroom 2.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a 9-step video guide to help you both prepare for Story Continuation Success in creative writing.

Lee, London, September 2022

Help Your Child Practise Story Continuation With Something You Already have In Your House…

9 story continuation tips for 11 plus entrance tests

We know story continuation is a popular choice for independent school 11plus exams, so let’s give your child as much help as we can. In the last post, you looked at a video guiding you through 9 vital, mini ‘must-haves’ of story continuation. I include the video again here, but now also wish to point you to a fantastic way to practise this with something you already have in your house.

Of course, you’ll be using sample exam papers from a range of resources, with story extracts and instructions to continue the story in a range of ways. Doubtless, these are excellent support. BUT…there’s another fantastic tool; the secret sauce – or secret source – you already have in your house.

BOOKS.

  1. Take a book you or your child already have on your bookshelf. Depending on the stage or age of your child, vary between simpler and more complex writing.
  2. Open the book and choose a page or two for you both to read. Chapter endings with mini-cliffhangers work well, as do chapter starters, but really, any 2 pages with a scene that can be developed will work.
  3. Point to the sentence you’d like your child to continue from: the moment a door is knocked; when a character is found out doing something they shouldn’t; the beginning of a difficult conversation; the moment a question is asked, and so on.
  4. Decide a focus for the piece. For example: ‘Continue Nirvana’s journey up the mountain as night falls’; ‘Write what happens when Arthur opens the magic cloud. Try to continue in the same style as the author.’
  5. Decide how long you want the writing to be and the time given to write it.
  6. Ask your child (you could model this with them the first couple of times) to read the text and search out the 9 elements shown in the Whizz-Bang story continuation rockets video.
  7. Repeat with a range of books. If you choose a mix of classic old children’s books alongside modern texts, the added advantage is your child will be trying to write in the same style as some of the most successful and brilliant authors. This will help them understand writers’ techniques, and should also improve their own writing style as they try out different sentence structures, word choices, paragraph techniques, etc.

Books are teachers (metaphor!).

Happy Writing!

Lee, London